29 Sneaky Waterbirds
About this episode
Some waterbirds are experts at staying out of sight. Matt Herring shares the world of Australian Bitterns, snipes, rails, crakes and other sneaky birds of farmland and waterways.
Episode illustration: Australasian Bittern
Matt Herring has been captivated by threatened and cryptic waterbirds for 25 years. His research on brolgas began in the late 1990s and he quickly realised the importance of farmers as wetland custodians. This has guided his studies ever since and soon he’ll work on his 1000th farm in the Murray-Darling Basin. Over the past decade, he has led the Bitterns in Rice Project, completing his PhD and developing incentive programs that marry food production and conservation through the co-management of water. Matt is also tackling conservation of the endangered and near-mythical Australian Painted-snipe.
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Kirsty: This episode was recorded on Wiradjuri country. I would like to pay my respects to Elders past and present. The Wudjari are the people of the Three Rivers. Their Country extends from Coonabarabran in the north, straddling the Great Dividing Range down to the Murray River and out to western New South Wales. I would like to thank the Wiradjuri people for letting us borrow their language for bird names such as corella, Gang Gang and kookaburra.
Kirsty: Hello. I'm your host, Kirsty Costa, and this is Weekend Birder podcast. In this episode, I'd like to introduce you to Matt Herring. I've been watching Matt's work from afar, so I'm really chuffed that he can join us. Here is how Matt discovered his love of wild birds.
Matt: I think if I had to pin it to one event or a day, it was when I was 18 and I went out with a bunch of Field Naturalists and birdwatchers, many of them, you know, in their 70s or older. And I'd been a really passionate bushwalker through my teens and I'd always appreciated a bird of prey, like a wedge tailed eagle or a colourful robin or something like that. But that's about where it ended. And so I went out with these people for this day in Chiltern Box Ironbark National Park in northeast Victoria, and my mind was blown. It was, it was like an epiphany. They showed me about 40 different bird species in a couple of hours or so. And I just thought, "I can't believe I've been walking past all these little treasures while I've been bushwalking". And it really was a turning point. And so pretty soon after, it turned into an obsession. So I wasn't one of those birdwatchers right through their childhood and their teens. It was more about bushwalking for me. And then this came afterwards. But yeah, it was an amazing moment. The honeyeaters and fantails and robins and Pardalotes and all sorts of stuff. They really blew my mind that day. So I credit those old school birds and naturalists living around Albury, Wodonga and Chiltern.
Kirsty: Matt has been an ecologist for over 20 years and he has published more than 50 reports, booklets papers and field guides. He works with rural communities to identify what local wildlife is in their area and how they can improve their properties to create better habitats. Matt's research on Brolgas began in the late 1990s and then he quickly realised the importance of farmers as wetland custodians.
Matt: I have come to specialise in waterbirds and wetland habitats. So these, these are areas that are perhaps not always wet, not always flooded. They might dry out for half the year or perhaps even many years. But when they're full, it's when birds like black swans and brolgas and herons and egrets and things like that come to feed and breed. And I specialise further in those habitats that are on private land. So these are wetlands on farms, for example, not not so much wetlands in national parks and nature reserves. So that's what my work is all about. It's about working with landholders like farmers and trying to get the best out of their wetlands for water birds, but other wildlife as well, like frogs and bats. So a good example of, of this sort of thing is with farm dams, it depends what definition you use, but there's at least half a million of them across Australia and some people suggest it's even a lot more than that. But we'll stick with half a million and most of them are really poor for biodiversity, for wildlife like waterbirds, because they're grazed constantly by sheep or cattle and they have very little value for wildlife. But simple changes such as fencing it off from those stock and giving them an alternative watering point, like pumping out to a trough, for example, and letting the water plants get away that are now not being eaten and trodden on by the cows and sheep. That sort of thing can make a huge difference. What we've seen when farmers do this kind of work is a great response from birds like these sneaky birds, like crakes and rails and even some really threatened birds like the Australasian Bittern. But just overall, if you can get shallows in farm dams that support water plants, it makes a huge difference for for our wildlife. And given there's so many farm dams across the country, this is one way that we can really protected areas like national parks to really build on the habitats that exist in reserves. There's also these great opportunities on private land.
Kirsty: Matt says that improving farm dams has had a lot of benefits, not only for wildlife but also for farmers and their stock.
Matt: I think the driving force is that that love of nature for sure, just wanting to to help out the birds and frogs and bats and other animals on their property. But there's certainly other benefits, like, for example, mental health, to be able to have this place, especially during droughts to go down, that is bursting with life and there's lots of activity from the wildlife is so. Good for for someone's mental health. It's a great we've had feedback like it's a great place to have a cup of tea, to sit down and listen and look and just take time out from a busy day. So it's definitely benefits there, but also economic benefits. So giving your stock cleaner water to drink, water to drink that they haven't been defecating in or urinating in, obviously makes sense. So the stock have improved health from drinking cleaner, clearer water.
Kirsty: Matt has been captivated by what he calls sneaky water birds. Sneaky water birds include shy birds like bitterns, crakes, rails and snipes.
Matt: These sneaky water birds, these cryptic ones that you more often hear rather than see. I think it's because so little is known about them, and some of them are among our most threatened birds. So there's that real need for research and for us to better understand what they need is also the challenge. They are so difficult to study. Some of them, it's hard enough to get a look at, let alone learn about their breeding and their movement patterns and stuff like that. So the challenge is certainly part of it, but they're just a wonderful group of birds and really quite diverse. You know, you've got these tiny little Ballion Crakes, you know, like the size of a small quail, right up to two large bitterns and some of the large rails that somehow they can manage to be so sneaky despite being as big as a heron or an egret.
Kirsty: Matt is here to share his knowledge about some of these sneaky water birds. Let's start with the Australasian Bittern, which is also known as the Bunyip Bird.
Matt: It's such a special bird. It's an important part of Australia's cultural identity. The link with the Bunyip Bird has been going for many thousands of years. This call that the males make during the breeding season, a big booming sound that you can hear for two kilometres on a still summer's morning or evening. That is the link with the Bunyip. So that's the sound of the Bunyip. I can just imagine people scaring their kids, "Don't go in the swamp. You can hear you can hear him over there". So that's a really good starting point to try and identify the Australasian Bittern is to listen out for that big booming sound. If you're lucky enough to have a wetland near you, go there in spring and summer when there's no wind early in the morning or late in the afternoon and just listen. And it'll be such a thrill when you hear your first boom. It's the sound that I've heard described as something you don't so much here, but you feel it. It's so deep that almost every phone I've ever had can't play the call. You need much better speakers to get that bass out. So it's an amazing sound and I never tire of hearing it. It's such a such a pleasure. And then if you're lucky enough to see these Australasian Bitterns, the only bird that you really likely to get mixed up with is an immature Nankeen Night Heron. Now they're also pretty sneaky. They nest up in trees, they often roost in trees. So if you think you've found a bittern and it's in a tree, I probably bet you all the money I have that it is in fact a Nankeen Night Heron. I've never seen a bittern in a tree. Now the Nankeen Night Herons, the immature ones, have this similar brown and creamy plumage, so the colour is very close. But they're only about half the size. They never make that booming sound. Nankeen Night Herons you often see in flocks there might be 10, 20, sometimes hundreds or even thousands at the moment breeding. But Australasian Bitterns, you're lucky if you get to see 2 or 3. So that's a good one to start with. Now the crakes and rails. Even some of Australia's best birdwatchers still get tricked by these birds. They have quite a few different calls and it's really difficult for me to imitate them. So I would recommend people if if they are interested in figuring out those weird sounds coming out of the rushes and the cumbungi is to go online because all these calls are online, I tend to use Xeno-canto, which is an international website and it's so helpful. You can go to a bird like Baillon's Crake and there might be 30 or 40 different high quality recordings there. And because they have they have such variation in, in the calls they make, it can be really helpful. Some people might think they're hearing a frog or a cricket and a lot of the time I reckon they'll find out that it's a crake or a rail or one of these other sneaky waterbirds. So you've got the big boom of the Australasian Bittern. It's very obvious, unmistakable. Pretty much there's some deep sounds that you get from other birds, like maybe a Purple Swamphen or a bronzewing pigeon, but pretty much it's unique. Whereas these crakes or that's that's elite level and a real challenge for, for people to figure out. But if you can't do that, just sitting there next to some rushes or reeds where there's a bit of mud, if you stay quiet, they will come out. And some people have got the most amazing photographs, the most amazing views through their binoculars just from the crakes and rails getting comfortable with you sitting there and just poking their bodies out from the cover. It's always a special moment.
Kirsty: Many thanks to John Graff for uploading his recording of the Australasian Bittern to the Xeno-canto website. I've never heard a bittern in the wild before, but if it sounds anything like that, I am sure in for a treat. Another sneaky waterbird that interests Matt is the Australian Painted Snipe.
Matt: Just imagine the most beautiful bird you've ever seen. And that's what a Painted Snipe looks like. They're quite small. If people are familiar with plovers or sandpipers or those small sort of shorebirds, they're like that. They've got a really long bill. That's a very obvious thing and reasonably long legs. But the pattern on their body. Both the male and the female, it's just outstanding. It's like the most amazing artwork you've ever seen. I don't even want to try and describe it. I just encourage people to go online or to look in their bird book and lock in the image of the Australian painted snipe. A gorgeous bird. The only thing that people are likely to get mixed up with is the Latham Snipe. It's another awesome sneaky water bird, but it breeds in Japan in their northern summer and then spends its non-breeding season down here in our summer. Have a look in the in the bird books. That's the best way to lock in those those different images we could consider it the leader of the sneaky water bird crew. Unfortunately a very rare bird. Our latest estimate in the last couple of years is only 340 birds. So it's pretty desperate. This is when you start thinking about captive breeding and that sort of thing. One good story is that just in the last couple of days, we've had a sighting of over 20 birds in northern New South Wales. And that's that's very exciting because there's been hardly any found for a couple of years. So the Australian Painted Snipe breeds here, we know very little about it and we're hoping to be able to catch some in the next month or two and put special little tags on them. We'll be able to see where they go. We want to track their movements and find out the other wetlands that they use. But they like the crakes, the rails and the bitterns. They need that combination of shallow water with the water plants and the painted snot also love mudflats. So if anyone had the good luck of coming across one, it would be amazing and they should report it to BirdLife Australia. Every sighting is so valuable for a bird when you get down to such low numbers. The Australian Painted Snipe is one that we're really worried about. Hopefully now all these floodwaters are receding and there's more and more habitat becoming available. So we're hoping that a surge of records is has begun.
Kirsty: After listening to Matt, I'm adding to my to do list... visit Xeno-canto.org website to listen to the different calls of bitterns, rails, crakes and snipes. I'm also going to get out my bird books to look at this famous Australian Painted Snipe. Sounds amazing. I'll post a few links in the episode notes to help you out as well. One of the major projects that Matt has worked on is called Bitterns in Rice. This project bridges the gap between agriculture and wildlife conservation in the Murray-Darling Basin.
Matt: The Bitterns in Rice project began about 11 or 12 years ago and during that time we've managed to get the entire Riverina rice industry behind this bird. It's so heartening that they've taken this species on board and been leading its conservation. So the reason why that's so important is because the largest number of Australasian Bitterns anywhere on earth occurs in the Riverina rice fields. So it's a funny situation. You tend to think of threatened species as clinging to the last little pieces of the most pristine habitat left. Like imagine the rainforest on top of a mountain or the last patches of shrubs out in a desert paddock. But here's a bird that has adapted to these sort of, you know, artificial wetlands. And they don't just use them, they breed in them. And so the project is focused on working with rice growers to tweak the way they manage their crop. The water levels, for example, when they flood it, what habitats are next to the rice field, all that sort of stuff, tweaking the way they do it to incorporate what the bittern needs to breed successfully before the season ends. So that's what the Bitterns in Rice Project is all about. But of course we know the rice alone is not enough for half the year it isn't there. And so we have tracked the birds a few years ago and they've gone to coastal wetlands right around south eastern Australia. And it just goes to show you that we need this this network of wetland habitats to maintain species like the Australasian Bittern, the Painted Snipe and the crakes and rails. And all of them - the Night Herons, egrets, they need this this network of wetlands to keep them going.
Kirsty: Matt has been watching sneaky water birds for over 25 years. He also loves watching other birds, too. Here's his advice for weekend birders like us.
Matt: One piece of advice that I would give a birdwatcher is just to find the places that you love the most and just keep going back to them. Getting to know spots deeply and almost intimately rather than trying to see hundreds and hundreds of different sites and species. There's something really special about having an intimate connection to a place. So this morning I was down on my own farm dam where I'd planted some cumbungi and I'm watching it all the time. And this season the Reed Warblers bred for the first time, and then I found an Australasian Grebe nest just floating there. And I just love that level of detail that you can get by knowing a site really well. You even start noticing individual eyes. You'll notice a certain Swamp Harrier flying over that has a certain molt. You can pick the same feathers in the right condition and know that that's Bob or Jennifer or whoever it might be. So I reckon that's that's a good piece of advice is to go for detail and deeper understanding of of your favorite sites.
Kirsty: Many thanks to Matt for sharing his love of waterbirds and for his tireless work in helping communities to integrate agriculture and wildlife conservation. Links to Matt's projects and social media accounts can be found in the episode notes or on the Weekend Birder website. Are you an Apple podcast user? Do us a solid and jump online to leave a rating and a review. It really helps little podcasts like this one, and I'm so grateful for your support.
